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We’ve had a ton of discussions with clients after the Project Management Institute (PMI)announcement that it would soon demand business and leadership training from its certification holders. Some organizations wanted just the facts – who, what, where, when, why, and how — then were on their way. A few weren’t interested for personal reasons: their organizations don’t require or reward PMI certification.

The most interesting talks, however, were with customers who didn’t really focus on the requirements at all. The original blog post or email had merely crystallized needs that they already had. We heard it again and again: “We’ve already had the basics, we’ve already put everyone through the curriculum. How do we get better, how do we advance?”

These kinds of conversations are music to my ears, because it means that we’re going to talk about building new and differentiated capabilities. In other words, these clients aren’t just thinking about industry standards and compliance. They now think strategically about how their staff’s strengths and weaknesses match up to their organization’s opportunities and threats.

So how does this play out in practice? Each firm or agency is different, but we believe there a few useful questions that help focus on the learning that your organization needs to advance.

As always, if your organization would like discuss these ideas and how it will impact your project management training curriculum, please use the contact form below. We are happy to review your current curriculum, your upcoming learning plans, and make recommendations.

I’ve been working on an initiative called “Value Delivery,” which will incorporate value management into our various PMO methods, tools, etc. These activities are often listed as typical PMO functions, but this really only honored in the breach. Value management never seems to take off given a PMO’s traditional emphasis on implementing project management methods, tools, training, etc.

In our approach, we will ensure that value management has its own identity, especially when it comes to training. While value and benefit management is baked into the various program and portfolio standards around, it isn’t part of the typical project manager’s skill set. Rolling out value management separately should emphasize the organizational and personal changes required to be successful.

What is value management’s objective? To ensure that execution remains focused on delivering against executives’s and stakeholder expectations. How does value management happen? Maybe the best way to illustrate is to briefly lay out the lifecycle we’re using below:

Glen Alleman and a number of commenters contributed to a great thread on math, PM, and complexity (here).

I try to keep the ideas of complexity “science” in mind when planning strategy and its execution. In particular, I have a deep respect for the power of self-organization and the need to create flexible rather than brittle management systems.

However, I’m not sure how powerful CAS really is as a theory, at least w/r/t/ project management. For example, how do its predictions advance my estimation approach beyond what we’re doing w/ probability distributions (e.g., Monte Carlo simulations via Crystal Ball)? To I really need math beyond that to get “good enough” estimates?

Greg Balestrero — CEO of the Project Management Institute — recently posted (here) on his experiences at the Scrum Gathering in Orlando. In my experience, Greg and the PMI staff have been very eager to foster a better relationship among the various methodology camps. Per Greg’s post,

[t]he intent of the visit was to bridge the gap between the Scrum Alliance and PMI. But I guess the real reason we attended was to dispel the myths that surround the PMBOK® Guide and Agile practice. There is a widely held opinion that the PMBOK® Guide and Agile don’t mix… they can’t be “shaken, nor stirred” together.

Please read the post…it gives an interesting perspective on how to build alliances among disparate points of view and how to overcome misconceptions.

Regular readers know that I’ve been harping on the increasing importance of program management, especially when it comes to realizing the benefits or value of projects. Project managers who simply run projects without reference to the larger business environment are becoming a commodity.

During the recent Global Corporate Council forum, I heard two thoughts that illustrated the challenge for PMs:

Greg Balestrero, the CEO of the Project Management Institute (Greg’s blog is here), calls project management “table stakes”. In other words, PM has become so widespread that it is no longer differentiating for an organization or person to be good at PM. In Greg’s opinion, PM-only lets/keeps you in the game…no more.

One council member quanitified the value of the PMP in terms of experience. He had to counsel a project manager who was very itchy to advance but was perplexed that his PMP hadn’t taken him further. The council member put it to him bluntly: “A PMP is worth about two years of experience in our organization, which is something… But it isn’t equivalent to leading and delivering a multi-year project or program.”

One of the reasons I’ve been remiss in my posting is that I’ve been preparing to host the Spring 2009 executive forum of PMI’s Global Corporate Council. My SAP colleagues did a great job helping me host and this forum was particularly productive.

“Networking” is a pat response when one talks about joining or leading industry groups. What exactly that means came home to me after discussions with my counterparts from Siemens, Joe Sopko and Kevin McDevitt. On two topics, just a few minutes of conversation helped me confirm the validity of one approach (on how to augment on program management content) and introduced a better metaphor (for the architecture of our new methodology).

Nothing big, eh? But how much benchmarking and justification will I avoid because I can say “well, Siemens had a similar problem and they did X“?